Book Talk: Love Interests, Parents, and Dead Bodies (Women and Men in Media)

While writing my review of The Watersong Quartet by Amanda Hocking and gushing about my love of all the female characters*, I started thinking of all the male characters and how they compared. I realized that the biggest male characters were the two love interests and the dad, and the minor male characters were dads, love interests and/or dead bodies (with the exception of the professor in Elegy, as I'd just remembered him now).

This reminded me of something I'd read a while ago saying that media often portrays women as fitting into one of three categories: girlfriend, mother, or dead body. I thought it was interesting that this book series seemed to do (almost) exactly this, but with boys instead of girls, and I made an offhand comment on how I loved that inverted trope.

I'd like to expand on that point a bit, as I am often careless with words and may have come across in a manner I did not intend. I do not think that men should only be portrayed as one of these three categories. I believe in gender equality, not in an oppressive matriarchy to replace the existing patriarchy. Men, women, and all other genders, all deserve to see themselves represented in entertainment as multi-faceted characters.

That being said, women are not being equally represented in entertainment**. There are tons of movies, TV shows, and books that

• use female characters lives and deaths solely for a male character's development and growth
• include a token woman as a love interest, while the rest of the background cast is male
• sexualize female murder victims (specifically crime shows and murder mysteries)

Entertainment that relegates guys to the background in order to let girls get the spotlight may not be reflecting a gender equality utopia, but it would definitely bring some balance to the current entertainment choices, which I think is a necessary step in leading to such a utopia in real life.

Either way, can anyone really deny us girls something meant specifically for us when there is already more than enough stuff catering specifically to the boys?

*In that I love many of the characters that are female, and I love that there are so many female characters (the main characters, the villains, the friends/allies)

**Non-gender binary people are practically invisible in entertainment, but that's a topic I'm not well-versed in, so I won't comment further.